Judging a book by its cover

My colleague Casey Seiler handed me this book the other day and said, “Here’s a title that is purely meant to get D’Souza on talk shows.”

Sure, it’s just not right to judge a book by its cover. But with something like 172,000 books published last year in the U.S. (I think I saw this figure in Publishers Weekly), readers have to filter through the onslaught somehow.

Here’s what a reviewer says about the above book in the NYTimes:

He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible.

The reviewer is Alan Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of “Does American Democracy Still Work?”